


The Trouble with Peace

by MercuryGray



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:35:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27083503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: He'd explained, slowly, in the way that he’d worked this out, about how things worth fighting for should go to war too - that if Home and Love and, yes, Peace, didn't do their bit, then the very, very worst of what humans could be would swallow up the men who went away.By the time he was done Peace was smiling. “I think that’ll do,” his god replied.In a world where Gods chose people, it doesn't seem likely that a man chosen by Peace should go looking for War - but Andy Haldane is going anyway. Based in Captainkilly's Form and Void universe.
Relationships: Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/ Original Female Character
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9
Collections: Form & Void Sideslip





	The Trouble with Peace

**Author's Note:**

> A couple of weeks ago captainkilly wrote a really lovely drabble in her Form and Void universe for one of her OCs, Rachel, and one of mine, Vivian.
> 
> Today I’m returning the favor with a little bit of worldbuilding on one of her favorite characters for what could be a continuation of her original drabble.

The trouble with Peace is that everyone has a different idea of what it means. 

For some men, it’s an open field - and for others, a heavily fortified wall.

Andy’d thought about this, often, and he thought that this was why his God so seldom chose humans. However many god-chosen walked among them, they were just never going to get it. _You all come into the world fighting,_ Peace had told him once, _kicking and screaming and yelling to get out, and most of you never stop._

“So what am I supposed to do with that?” ten year old Andy, who’d just tried to get between two of his friends and gotten a black eye for his troubles, had asked, despondent.

His golden-haired god fondly petted his hair and smiled, unconcerned. “Just be yourself,” he advised. “The rest will come. When you need me, reach for me. I’ll be there.”

The next time it happened, the argument over who got to quarterback and call the play, Andy took a deep breath, going deep into that place in himself that was warm and full of sunshine, of old books on Sunday afternoons and piano glissendos and the slow meandering notes of a saxophone solo, and when he breathed out again with his hands and his breath full of that feeling, at home in himself, he could feel the hands of his god on him, the power working through him. Oh. So that’s what he meant. “Let’s let Bobby do it,” he found himself saying, and he felt the tension around them ease, felt his god smile.

Things weren’t always so simple.

“You’re disappointed in me." 

He’d just filled out his enlistment papers, and just like a disapproving parent, Peace was there. "I’d like to hear what you were thinking first.”

And so he explained, slowly, in the way that he’d worked this out as he’d been reaching into himself, reaching for his god, about how things worth fighting for should go to war too - that if Home and Love and, yes, Peace, don’t do their bit, then the very, very worst of what humans could be would bubble up out of the ground and swallow the men who went to war back into darkness. He’d been thinking about those men at the Legion, the old-timers from the Great War who’d seen things, done things, that had left them broken, disillusioned, unable to say, at the end of the day, what it was they were fighting for except a couple of high-faluting phrases from Washington, words that, to them, meant nothing. 

By the time he was done Peace was smiling. “I think that’ll do,” his god replied. “But when you need me - ”

Andy repeated the words he now knew so well. “I will reach for you, always." 

And so Andy Haldane had gone to war. Before he’d been in the Pacific, he’d never truly known his god’s sister - but they were two halves of the same whole, and like all siblings, they argued incessantly. Wherever Peace was, War followed. He had always been able to feel her in the heat of a football game, her wings beating in his ears in the crush of the startline, heard her hiss and snarl in the tangled emotions of a developing barfight. War, as it turned out, was a tremendous flirt - the sort of girl who told you one thing and meant another. "What’s the matter, lover?” she asked with a grin, her kisses like sparks in the matchless dark. “Too good for me?”

But no matter what she tried, nothing would hold - Andy didn’t much care for girls like that, which he told Peace after yet another day on the Canal where everything had seemed like one thing and actually been different. 

“I didn’t think you would,” Peace replied, and the laugh they shared filled his chest with the warmth he needed to keep going another day. In those days, his cup was filled with different joys than Sunday afternoons, and when he reached out for his god, it was with thoughts of hot coffee, dry clothes and a quiet place to rest. _Why stand when you can sit, why sit when you can lie down, why lie down when you can sleep._

Even these days, at home in Lawrence amidst undisturbed Sunday afternoons and secondhand bookstores and all the jazz his record player would play, sometimes he still reached into himself for those memories of hot coffee and cold Pacific mornings. Those were the things that had given him Vivian, hadn’t they? For she was a part of his peace now, too, a part that he’d fought for just as much as he’d fought for muddy, scummy bits of ground that didn’t even have names. Sitting in that hospital ward, waiting for his body to mend, she’d come by his bed with a fixed-on smile, and his bones had ached to give this woman all the things he’d given his soldiers, all his autumn afternoons on the Common and the slow swirl of dances in a dark clubroom with a body pressed close to your own. 

She wasn’t chosen by War, but she was certainly marked by her - an underfed body, a mind filled with terrible dreams. They’d faded, a little, over time, those marks, with the careful application of love and kisses and long walks by the canal, but the thing that had helped the most, he thought, was that she was a part of it now, part of his peace, the absolute surety that came with making use of a god’s gift. And hopefully would continue to be, for a long time to come - as the box burning a hole in his pocket would attest.

But that was a problem for this afternoon. This morning, Vivian had someone she wanted him to meet, a waitress from a diner she’d been to yesterday that served the best beignets, and, she assured him, absolutely the best coffee. “Strong, like yours,” she’d said.

This woman looked like sunshine - all red curls and smiles. It wasn’t hard to see why Vivian had started talking to her. But there was something else, a certain sense that they’d…met before. “Andy, this is my new friend, Rachel. Rachel, this is Andy.”

They shook hands, and it was like coming home. He recognized himself in her eyes, the sister he’d never had, borne from the same blood and stamped by the same divine hand. “Hi, Andy,” she said with a smile, and he knew, without asking, that she knew the same things he did, about being yourself, about reaching out for the hand of your god, and he knew that he would never have to explain anything to her about walls or fields or the true nature of Peace.


End file.
